This document discusses three levels of cross-disciplinarity: multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity involves several disciplines addressing a topic without integrating their perspectives. Interdisciplinarity aims to integrate knowledge from different disciplines by developing new methodologies and approaches. Transdisciplinarity seeks to understand the world as a whole by going beyond individual disciplines and integrating them at a higher level of abstraction.
3. Cross Disciplinarity: Transdisciplinarity
concerns that which is at once between the
disciplines, across the different disciplines,
and beyond all discipline.
Its goal is the understanding of the world, of
which one of the imperatives is the unity of
knowledge. Basarab Nicolescu
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Editor's Notes
#2: Multidisciplinarity
concerns studying a research topic not in one discipline but in several at the same time.
Example: studying a Giotto painting from the perspectives of art, and history, and religion, and geometry
Gee-ot to
#3:
has a different goal ... it concerns the transfer of methods from one discipline to another.
Example: Nuclear medicine
Using formal logic to understand the structure of the law
#4: Inter and multi are not bad, theyre essential but are incomplete
But whats really powerful is problem solving that transcends the disciplines
A few months ago I found a rather compelling taxonomy for Disciplinarity developed by Basarab Nicolescua Romanian quantum physicist turned philosopher.
His insights on Disciplinarity were motivated by the convergence of physics at different scales and the connections with chemistry and biology that developed in the 20 the century.
He defines multi-disciplinarity as studying a topic from the perspective of several disciplines which leads to a richer understanding of the topic
He explains interdisciplinarity as a transfer of methods from one discipline to another so business analytics is interdisciplinary in that the methods of statistics and machine learning are transferred to business where the focus might be on customer data.
But the goal of both inter-disciplinarity and multi-disciplinarity remain within the framework of disciplinary work according to Nicolescu
He also introduced the idea that the disciplines could combine on research that transcends that of the disciplines in pursuit of the unity of knowledge. which is a pretty inspirational
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Multi-disciplinary: studying a Giotto painting from the perspectives of art, and history, and religion, and geometry
New applications: Nuclear medicine or business analytics
Enhanced epistemology: Using formal logic to understand the structure of the law
New disciplines: The emergence of complexity and chaos from mathematical physics to meteorology (Edward Lorenz) and commodity prices (Mandelbrot)
Bah-sah-rab Nick-o-less-que